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Parking reserved! >> The lowdown on the city's empty, reserved curbsides
by PHILIP PREVILLE Photos by Gunther Gamper You're driving downtown, wandering through the one-way maze, looking for a place to park. All 6,373 parking meters in the downtown area are in use by other motorists. Still, every street has lots of empty space--but you can't park in any of it because it's reserved for someone else.
Final factoids: Horse-drawn calèches and tour buses have 48 reserved spots each. There are 25 restaurants with permission to monopolize two spaces every night after 6 p.m. for valet parking. Cops and ambulances have their own reserved spaces in various trouble spots--including, most notably, the corner of Crescent and Ste-Catherine. And then there's the labyrinthine system for residential parking, but that's another Thing altogether. |
With at least 1,000 bus stops around the city, that's more than 4,000 places where you can't park. On Ste-Catherine alone, between Atwater and Papineau, there are 100 would-be parking spaces reserved for public transit--which is maybe how you should have made your way downtown in the first place.
These diplomats are one of Montreal's biggest mysteries: they have all this parking, yet they never seem to use it. The city's "diplomatic corps," working in consulates from 47 countries, have been granted a total of 124 spaces--all prime curbside real estate. One city official claims that free street-level parking for diplomats is actually written into the Geneva Convention.
The city's 425 taxi stands take up about 700 parking spaces; about 250 of those are located downtown. Technically the taxi stands are available to any cab in the city, but in reality the law of the jungle applies. "About half the taxi stands are monopolized by individual companies, and they'll harass anyone who treads on their turf," says city spokesperson Michel Demers. "Diamond, for example, hogs the parking near the bus station on St-Hubert. If an independent cabbie went there looking for a fare, well, let's just say he wouldn't go back a second time."